Shield of Innocence (Alternate Places Book 4) (25 page)

"Nope? I'll close tonight.
You get out of here. Go and... I don't know what you do for fun. I was thinking
about going to the beach or something soon. Maybe for a few days? Just to get
away, and... I don't know." He felt silly, saying that out loud. Zack had
been gone far more than there, after all. For tens of thousands of years, over
the last real world year or so.

The thing there was that he was
always doing something in the void. It had a certain restful quality, but it
wasn't actually fun.

Instead of
tisking
at him,
his work manager actually just nodded.

"About time. Let me know
when you're going to be gone and I can close down the travel from here. I still
have to keep the doors open, being an embassy, but... Yeah. We should do
that."

Zack snorted.

"Or just route them all
through Something Wonderful for a few days? They need to be there to handle the
place, but they have
six
employees there. On the other hand we can wait
for Jen to get back from school and get her and Kate to handle this place?
That's only about a week from now. Not that I know where to go. Maybe
Australia?"

That got a soft sound that was a
bit like a hiccup. There was a very funny expression to go with it for some
reason. Zack didn't need to talk to Lisa's shadow to understand what she was
about to say. It was obvious, and nearly like he could read people or something
suddenly.

"You can go anywhere in any
world, and pick... Australia?"

"Maybe. It's a nice place
from what I've seen. I know, most people would go to Lesser Shia, but... They
still won't let me in. Or... I don't know, I could maybe go and visit people?"
That sounded less restful.

Lisa didn't seem bothered by him
being boring, and just patted his shoulder.

"Whatever you pick. Just let
me know what we're doing. You get time off whenever you want it, after all.
It's in the original charter."

That was the document that
everyone else at the mall had drawn up for him. The one where they'd named nine
different women as his wife. Wives. Managers really, but different ideas
permeated other cultures. Like the fact that to Merry, they were married for
real. Claire kind of held to that as well.

The rest were a bit more free
form, thankfully.

Lisa, at least, seemed to be
pleased by the idea that she and Maryl might actually be able to get away at
the same time Zack did. If they waited for Kate and Jennifer to get back first.
It would take getting Gregory in, but he
was
the Ambassador for the
mages still, so he could go and do his job.

Not that she was counting on the
idea. After all, Zack had never really taken a break before, so the idea just
seemed alien now.

The next days actually moved
along in a fashion that seemed almost normal. No one showed up at times they
weren't supposed to, and Zack was able to keep on top of everything for once.
The store almost even ran itself after a while, with just a tiny bit of input
from him. Daily sweeping and straightening, and manning the till a few times
for the actual public.

As in people coming in to buy
candles. For the holidays.

There were transfers, but with
Troy away for eight hours a day handling Lesser Shia, Zack only had to put in
his own regular shifts to keep that caught up. It meant, after a week of that
kind of thing, that Zack realized he needed to actually go and do something for
real. The only highlight was that Kate, Don and Jelly were coming back, because
their finals were finished. Britney and Blain were going home to their mother's
house, which meant an actual car trip for
them
.

It would have been faster for him
to simply open up a shortcut to their house, but their mother had already made
plans. Plus, he wasn't certain she believed her kids knew him.

Zack made a point, along with
Chris, to be there to help them all move their things out of their dorm rooms.
They were both obviously great guys that way. That, or easily manipulated. It
took a very small amount of time, since carrying things a distance that
amounted to fifteen feet or so just wasn't that hard to get done. It took each
of them about half an hour to get everything handled, and then about an extra
hour to help the twins move their things, which had to be stuffed into the SUV
that their mother had gotten for the trip. It was new, and there was a regular
human man driving it.

One that
clearly
knew
nothing about the Alede, or line walkers. He was an older fellow, seeming to be
in his late fifties, and while it was clear that the man sitting in the red
vehicle was banging the hot woman that had come with him to get her younger
brother and sister, he was honestly kind of clueless about the whole thing.
Kendra, the hot Succubus mom, kept touching him, sending pulses of lust into
his arm and shoulder. It was pretty blatant mind control, but the man seemed
into it.

Zack, for his part, had to fight
off glaring at him. Not because he was using the woman with him for sex. You
didn't
do that with Alede.
They
used you. In this case it was even close to
being mind control, which could be considered sketchy, by her own kind. No,
this was all about the man, who didn't seem to recognize him

"Dr. Marsh." His voice
wasn't thrilled, but then the man had drugged him, and been scary, in that he
might have never let Zack out of the asylum. That wasn't the same as him having
been bad the whole time. When a person comes to you and says that they can walk
through holes in space, and see things that others didn't, like monsters and
shadows that lived inside the human mind, it was kind of easy to assume mental
illness was the cause. Even he could see it.

That didn't mean he wanted to
relive their happy time together.

The man smiled and gave him a
questioning look.

"I... Sorry, do I know
you?"

Zack shook his head and shrugged,
wondering if it would be petty to grab the man and pull him through a shortcut
and then abandon him in some far off land for a bit. The man had been a threat
to him, for a time, after all, and it was far too easy to think that he still
might be.

Instead he noticed Kendra and Blain
looking at him, both seeming a bit too interested.

So he looked at Blain, being that
he knew him best out of the three other people standing at the truck thing.
Kendra hadn't even asked his name, or been given it, so they didn't really know
each other yet.

"He was one of the doctors
at the institution I was held in. He always thought I was insane, but decided
that if I could hide it that well, I might be fine on the outside."

That got the man to look at him
closely, his face questioning.

"Zack? Hartley, wasn't it?
Well! How are you! Are you a student here? You look good." The man
actually seemed pleased to see that, his inner self almost giddy with the idea.
He was genuinely pleased to see that Zack was apparently able to keep himself
healthy, alive and even nicely dressed. Almost as much as it would have to find
his own child doing the same, after having a hard time of things for a while.

That made Zack feel slightly bad
about considering leaving him with the Elth or Trollienkeine like he had been.
Not that he actually would do it. After all, that would take time and effort on
his part, and Dr. Marsh was, in the end, just a person from his past. A piece
of it that he didn't really want to recall, all things considered.

So he smiled, and faked seeming
happy.

"Nope. I'm here to get my
cousin, Don. Um, Britney here is dating him?" That wasn't really true,
though if he had the right idea, the girl had sort of officially called him as
hers. That was mainly between the Alede however. She really liked him, which
was rare, but not impossible for them. Kate was kind of his girlfriend too, but
that was more about sex, if Zack had been told correctly.

The blonde girl, who looked to be
about eighteen, and could have modeled for any magazine in the world, without
makeup, nodded.

"Here he is now. Don! Come
meet Zack's old Doctor friend." It was really hard for the Alede not to
think of anyone capable of having sex as not being at least a potential buddy
or pal, so it was natural to state things that way.

What she was really going for was
indicating to the people walking up that they needed to hide everything about...
Well, reality. Humans weren't generally let in on all the secret ideas and
knowledge. Mainly because when they were, their ability to invent new things
and be creative with others abilities and powers tended to lead to bad
outcomes.

Don was walking with Kate, each
carrying half of a wooden box that was big enough to be heavier than anyone
needed to take to college with them. It was full too, with half the things
inside being nearly useless, if comforting to Britney.

His cousin, who really was that,
as it had turned out, looked enough like him to sell the role, naturally.

Out of all of them, it was Kate
who let her face go hard.

"From the hospital?"
She knew what that meant, even if he didn't talk about it much. That had been a
strange and intense time for him. Mainly thanks to the zombie drugs they'd
given him in an attempt to fix a thing that, as it turned out, wasn't a real
problem.

For nearly two years he'd been
trapped in what amounted to a hellish nightmare. The world was strange enough,
but having the shadows of the insane screaming at him non-stop, along with the
other things that he saw all the time had been a bit much to ask of anyone
really. It wasn't this gray haired man's fault, however. Not really. He'd been
in charge of the whole mess, but nothing in his world would have allowed the
man to understand what it was he'd done.

Zack tried to seem pleasant, but
Kate shook her head, and stared.

"No... That isn't
right
.
Kendra's friend just
happens
to be one of the people from your past? In
a different part of the country? That doesn't make sense. What are you doing
here?" She was staring at the Doctor, who seemed truly baffled by her odd
behavior. Luckily he was used to that kind of thing.

"I... Moved about a year
ago, to take a new position not that far from here. Then I met Kendra the other
day and she asked if I'd be willing to drive halfway across the country with
her brother and sister." He spoke like it was all pretty natural, and just
made sense.

Even Zack could see that it
really didn't. You might run into people from your past, of course. The
universe seemed to nearly arrange that kind of thing from time to time, though
there didn't always appear to be a reason behind it. That Dr. Marsh was there
for Britney and Blain however
meant
something. Probably that the whole
thing was a set up, or a trap.

Zack grinned, seeing how very
messed up the whole thing could be.

On the one hand if he let Britney,
in particular, go with the man, she was bound to be drawn into conversation
about Hartley, the line walking super star that she loved in a very school girl
and obsessed fan kind of way.
Now
there was no way that the man wouldn't
understand who that was. If he thought that Zack was going around still
claiming to walk through holes in space, that could mean trouble for him. At the
very least being pulled in on a seventy-two hour watch to make sure he wasn't a
danger to himself or others.

On the other other hand, it could
also be a real set up or trap, meant to capture or harm his friends. Almost
anything Zack did to try and prevent that from taking place would look
incredibly out of line however. The man, Marsh, would
get
that something
was up, too. He might not be in the loop on what truly existed, but he wasn't
stupid.

Literally everything he could
think of at the moment led to him being in trouble with someone, at least in
potential. That he had enemies, well, it seemed hard to imagine Arch-demons
setting up something that socially complex, but it wasn't outside of what they
could
do. If they had access to the future at all, and he didn't know they wouldn't
have that kind of ability, it could have been in the works for a long time.
Maybe before he was even born.

It could also have all be
coincidence, or, he realized, something set up by one of the Tricksters. They
had more than one of them around, though so far Rose and Riley hadn't been all
that rough on them. There had been another around, that had gotten Don changed
into a girl and gang raped, but even she wasn't a horrible person. Her actions,
as hard as they were to understand, had been required to keep the universe
together.

In a creepy and horrible way.

The thing there was that he was
totally stuck. Zack knew that trusting Britney to hold her tongue might not
work well on a two day road trip, for instance. Most people would just take
what she'd said as being her being a bit playful, or going over some silly
stories from the web. Dr. Marsh might not however, and the hold that Kendra had
over him wasn't enough to get around the fact that the man was smart. More than
bright enough to get the idea of things being different than he thought they
would be.

He was single, Zack knew, from
his shadow, and while the man didn't seem to know about anything being set up
involving him, he was starting to get suspicious. Mainly because Kendra was far
too good looking for her to have been interested in him. He wasn't a fool, and
knew that she was trading sex for the use of his vehicle and cash for the trip,
but as long as he got laid each night, it seemed fair to him.

Not that one man was going to be
enough for her really. How that one was going to function he didn't know.
Probably a lot of quickies at rest stops.

It was Kate who just shrugged,
and turned to the man.

"This is a real coincidence
then! Well, let's get you all loaded, and underway. Zack mentioned you. You're
in the story he wrote. About the line walker? We're
all
in there.
Britney can tell you about that? It's pretty much taken from when he used to
see things, isn't that right?" She turned to him, so he nodded, even if
the cover story might not hold. It also might not be enough, if there was some
other kind of plan involved.

A trap for his friends, or
whatever might be coming.

"Yeah. I saw a lot back
then. It was... Kind of wild, to tell the truth. Anyway, I started to journal
after I got out, and that turned into the stories. Then people decided they
liked them. So, you know, minor fame. At least among the twenty-six people that
read them." He laughed, and the Doctor smiled at him, warmly.

"So you're a writer
now?"

He shook his head.

"Not professionally. I just
post some things online. I work in a candle shop, mainly. Which I need to get
back to. We have a bit of a trip too, in order to catch the flight on
time." He didn't know that the man would remember him as having moved to
Vancouver, Washington, but if it came up, sounding reasonable about it made
sense.

After that they made trips back
and forth to get the remaining gear the twins had senselessly crammed into
their dorm rooms, and then let the four people drive off. The super twins,
their hot sexy mother that looked far too young to be that, and a man that could
destroy his entire world, if the wrong thing was said.

As soon as they pulled out, Kate
was on her cell phone.

"Hiram? We need someone
followed. It could be a set up. For Blain, Britney and their mother?" She
went into the whole thing, and oddly enough, Hiram stone, Jen's uncle, and
career criminal who'd moved into spying for the Nation of Walkers, had a car on
them less than fifteen minutes later. Just following along behind them.

Kate looked at Zack after she
hung up.

"We'll have a full
protective detail on them. Now as long as Brit can stop from insisting that you're
the for real Hartley, we'll be fine. Blain
should
be able to keep her
reigned in. If not... Well, then I don't know what to do. What if he tries to
put Zack away again? Or if this is meant to get him to do that to
Britney?"